How many days do I have left to serve in Purgatory now?

The day I wrote this was my saint’s day, and my oh-so-Catholic father left me a message saying he had “bought a mass” for my intentions on this special day. The message also said that he was going to Vermont for a long weekend with my mother, so we won't be getting together like we usually do on Thursdays. Which is too bad, for me. I like having a soporific meal and a bottle of wine, sometimes even champagne, in the middle of the day at the end of the week. It kind of takes the edge off, if you can imagine…but they are off to a resort in a barn this month. My parents really need their monthly vacations because they work such crazy hours; I calculated it to be about 85 hours a week, and this is in four full days, Saturdays and Thursdays “off”. The off is in quotes, because he generally puts in four hours or more at his office before he comes home to drive his riding mower around at 45 miles per hour on their 3 acres of lawn. They have a team of gardeners (Yep. A team. I’d call one guy bossing the other three guys around a team.) come and do stuff a few days a week, but the lawn mowing is my father’s special province; the British feel rather protective of their grass. Must be a cultural gene that missed a generation in me. I like grass to be green and there. I don’t freak out of people park on it, drive on it, forget to mow it, or, as my DH has done, burn it brown and crispy by leaving a glass topped outdoor table upside down on it for five hours on a broiling hot Saturday. It’s just grass. But to my father, it’s another child.

Once I drove along the lawn rather than on the potholed driveway. “Potholed? But I thought they spent hours and hours on a daily basis on their property?” you may say. While they do take a lot of trouble with the garden and the lawn, they don’t bother with the driveway – it’s not green, growing or flowering, so it’s is not a subject of interest. That’s just the way it is. So, there I was, in my two-day-old new car, not wanting to dive into a two-foot deep pothole full of mud and water, get the car filthy and hear the chassis scrape on what’s left of their tarmac. So I inched a teeny tiny bit onto the grass, just along the edge, with two wheels and drove on the lawn for about four feet. Whoo boy! Y’all should have heard the upset and disappointed-in-you message on my voice mail that night…

Anyway, my lawn-loving parent called and left a message that they would be going to VT tomorrow, therefore I will not be able to enjoy their company. I guess I’ll just go to Costco as an outing by myself. He used the words “bought a mass”. I wonder how many indulgences he purchased, and many fewer days in Purgatory I have to go through now? Is there way I can exchange some of them for fewer bad days here on earth?